Video Asylum

Posted by oscar (A) on December 02, 2007 at 18:31:58

In Reply to: RE: Well, Ole, I'm heading out today to buy a HD DVD player! posted by jsm on December 01, 2007 at 11:52:16

" Ole, you can quote all the statistics you want, but so far we are in the early stages. If the HD DVD players prices stay cheap or gets even cheaper, say near $100, and BD players don't get close to that, I think it will be all over fairly soon, at least in the US. It seems like everybody is buying HD TV sets these days, and they are going to want a HD player once they realize how good they can be. If they can be had for $100 or so, the average buyer won't care in the least if it's BD or HD DVD, and they will fly off the shelves."

I seriously doubt it will be over "soon". And if it is, it will be because Warner's went Blu-ray-exclusive because of dismal HD DVD software sales despite the Toshiba Firesales. I think Sony/Fox/Disney are solidly in the Blu-ray camp and no matter what anyone else does, Blu-ray is here to stay.

HD DVD can provide a very good picture, but the lack of consistency in HD DVD video encodes and the absence of lossless/uncompressed audio on the great majority of HD DVD releases suggests storage/bandwidth issues HD DVD cannot avoid. I think the closer the studios look at this issue, the less likely they will be to abandon Blu-ray and the more likely they will be to abandon HD DVD.